I co-founded a gym in 2019, in Melaka. For the first few years I could tell you almost anything about how our members trained — how they moved, where they plateaued, what made them come back. What I could not tell you, with any honesty, was whether the business underneath them was healthy.
I knew the body. I didn't know the money.
This year I finally sat down with The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman. I'd avoided it for a long time. Some part of me suspected it would expose how little I actually understood about the thing I'd been running. It did. And I'm grateful it did.
The Coach Who Looked Away from the Numbers
There's a quiet pattern among people who build a business out of a craft they love. The trainer who opens a studio. The cook who opens a kitchen. The teacher who starts a school.
We are fluent in the craft. We go strangely silent on the finances.
It isn't laziness. It's fear wearing the costume of focus. "I'm a coach, not an accountant" sounds humble. For me, it was really an excuse to look away. Why? Because the craft is where my identity lives — and the numbers might tell me I wasn't as in control as I felt on the gym floor.
So I lived inside that excuse. I mistook a busy month for a healthy business. I mistook profit on paper for money I could actually use. For a long time, those felt like the same thing. They are not.
Stripping It Down to What a Business Actually Is
Kaufman's first move is brutally simple. Every business, he says, is the same five things in a chain — value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, finance. Break one link and you don't have a business; you have a hobby that loses money.
I'd poured years into the first four. The fifth, I'd treated as someone else's department. So I made myself learn it, the way I'd make a beginner learn a squat — slowly, badly at first, one rep at a time. Three things rewired how I see Fitcom.
1. Cash flow tells the truth. There are three financial statements, but only one of them speaks plainly: the cash flow. Profit is a story you tell with timing and assumptions. Cash is what's in the account when the rent is due. A beautiful profit line sitting on top of weak cash flow is a business quietly walking toward a wall. I had never once looked at it weekly. Now I do.
2. Price on value, not on cost. My instinct, for years, was to look at what the gym next door charged and sit just under it. Kaufman calls that the weakest of the four ways to price. The real question isn't "what does this cost me?" — it's "what is this genuinely worth to the person in front of me?" When you serve someone well, that number is higher than your fear lets you charge.
"You can determine the strength of a business over time by the amount of agony they go through in raising prices."
3. There are only four ways to grow. More customers. Bigger transactions. More often. Higher prices. That's the whole list. It sounds obvious written down, but it's clarifying — instead of chasing a hundred scattered ideas, you ask which of four levers you're actually pulling, and whether the one you keep avoiding is price.
What Changed at Fitcom
We're four studios across two cities now — Melaka and Seremban. For most of that growth, I led with the body and hoped the money would follow. Reading this book, I stopped hoping and started looking.
I began reading our cash flow the way I read a client's progress — regularly, honestly, without flinching at a bad week. We stopped reflexively competing to be the cheapest, and started asking what our coaching is actually worth to the member who stays for years, not just the one who signs this month.
None of this turned me into a finance person. It did something quieter. It removed the fog I'd been calling "focus." For the first time, the numbers and the mission were looking in the same direction.
The Number I Stopped Chasing
The idea from the book that stayed with me longest isn't a formula. Kaufman calls it sufficiency. A business doesn't have to be maximised. It has to earn enough to be worth continuing.
That one word reorganised something for me. I don't want to squeeze Fitcom for the largest possible number. I want it to earn enough — enough to be stable, enough to pay people well, enough to keep its promises to members — and then I want to take whatever is left over and pour it back into the people and the systems that make the next year better.
For years I thought understanding money would make me harder. It did the opposite. Knowing the numbers is what finally let me stop chasing them.
Enough, on purpose, is not a smaller ambition. It's a clearer one.
I came to business through fitness — through wanting people to change their lives in a room I built. I avoided the money because I was afraid it would pull me away from that. It turns out the money, understood honestly, is just one more way to protect it.